Hitori
by katiesparks
Summary: Hitori: One alone. Futari: Two together. Fact: They were twins. Fact: They were not both Hikaru. Fact: That which was not Hikaru was Kaoru. Fiction: They were both there.
1. Hitori

Hitori, one alone. They were never that, though it often felt like people saw them that way. Futari, two together, a pair. That's what they always were and always would be.

Forever.

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><p>If Hikaru and Kaoru really tried, they could remember back to a time before anything, or so it seems. They remember very little of it, but the memory is the only one that is not the exact same for them both and that makes it remarkable. Hikaru remembers someone screaming—he knows who they are, he recognizes that voice, he's <em>sure<em> of it, but he can't put a name to it for some reason—and the taste of pennies in the air. Kaoru doesn't remember the screaming—though he does recall the same taste of pennies, though it was more like the taste was in his mouth rather than the air—and someone shaking him violently.

That is their earliest memory and the only one that ever seems to differ; every other experience is recalled in the exact same way. But they don't think about that memory very often.

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><p>They realize very early on that even their own mother has trouble telling them apart, so they don't object when she refers to both of them as Hikaru. It's somewhat annoying to Kaoru sometimes, but he's always been a bit milder than his brother, so he doesn't let it get to him. Every once in a while, Hikaru demands that his mother address Kaoru as well and she always gets upset when he does, as if it's too much trouble to acknowledge both of them. But she complies when he asks.<p>

"Kaoru." She says softly, as though unwilling.

It makes Kaoru smile to hear his name and that's reason enough for Hikaru to trouble his mother every once and a while.

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><p>Other people do the same as their mother, just calling both of them Hikaru. But it doesn't matter. They know which is which, even if nobody else does and no one ever will.<p>

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><p>Hikaru and Kaoru really do hate to be separated, even for something as trivial as dinner and all of the servants know that. It's a good thing too, it'd be troublesome to sit in separate chairs and eat off of separate plates.<p>

So they squeeze into the same chair while they are still small enough to do so and eat off of the same plate and think that it's a good thing the servants figured it out so long ago. They must've been bothersome children for the tradition to go so far back that they can't remember there ever being two places set for them.

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><p>Surprisingly enough, it's middle school before they figure out just how wrong everything is.<p>

They've been locked up tight in their own world, uncaring of anyone outside of it. They just don't question why their classmates always stare at them when they are having a conversation, or why everyone keeps their distance. They are twins, identical twins, a rarity, something self-contained to be admired from outside. They are unapproachable and they like it that way.

It's strange that it's Tamaki Suoh that alerts them to it.

"You're Hikaru Hitachiin, right?" The blonde upperclassman asks as he walks up with a smile one day.

Hikaru sighs and Kaoru pats his arm. Everyone does it, none of them even know Kaoru's name, all because they've allowed everyone to refer to them as one person for so long. Hikaru thinks he should've nipped it in the bud with their mother from the very beginning, but he was just a child then, he couldn't have known. It's just too late now.

"…So, basically, I'm forming a club and I think you'd be a perfect addition to it!" Tamaki concludes what was probably a long, flowery speech that the twins had unfortunately zoned out of.

After a moment, Hikaru noticed the strangeness of the request and tried to call the older boy out on it. "Are you inviting both of us then, or just me? You did say 'you' after all."

The blonde looks confused. "Both of you?"

Angry that the upperclassman was referring to the two of them as if they were one person, as if they couldn't be separate, Hikaru finally snaps. "Yes, both of us! Me and my twin brother, Kaoru! I'm so tired of everyone always treating us as if we aren't different people!"

Tamaki still looks confused. "I'm sorry, Hikaru, no one told me you had a twin brother! You're always alone, after all."

Hikaru felt his world spinning and suddenly, he was squeezing his brother's hand, Kaoru's hand clasping back at his with the same intensity. Hikaru looked into his brother's eyes and saw fear there that he knew was mirrored in his own. "But he's right here." Hikaru insisted after a moment, his voice trembling as he turned to look at Tamaki. "Kaoru's _right here._"

"I'm sorry, Hikaru," Tamaki said, the look in his eyes betraying his own shock, "I don't see anyone."

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><p>Hikaru did end up joining the Host Club, under Kaoru's insistence. If no one was able to see him all this time, they must have thought Hikaru was crazy. Joining something like this might still be able to convince them otherwise.<p>

Unfortunately, Tamaki had decided Hikaru's role should be the 'Broken Type', the dashingly handsome, but psychologically unstable boy that every girl dreams of being the one to fix. Hikaru really didn't approve, but Kaoru thought it was a great joke and said he should go along with it and 'really ham it up for the ladies'. After thinking about it, Hikaru eventually did agree, it would be fun, wouldn't it?

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><p>Sometimes, Kaoru still refused to accept that no one could see him. He would sit up in their bed before they went to sleep and claim vehemently that their mother had spoken to him, even if she had been saying Hikaru's name. She would ask him to bring her something and he would and she would thank him. She might've been saying Hikaru's name but he handed it to her with his own hands. She had to have noticed that it was him and not his brother.<p>

She just had to have noticed that there were two of them and that they were both speaking to her.

Kaoru kept insisting and Hikaru agreed, he'd seen Kaoru interact with their mom, though she had been calling him Hikaru, so she had to have seen him, she just didn't notice that he was the wrong twin.

Eventually, they gave up trying to figure it out.

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><p>One day, a strange boy who turned out not to be a boy caused a bunch of mischief in the Host Club. Hikaru and Kaoru thought it was all a great joke.<p>

Really, the joke was on them, though.

"Hikaru?" she asked, interrupting him in the middle of a conversation with Kaoru.

"What?" he asked, glowering at her. This was his lease favorite part, when someone found out about his twin and decided he was crazy. But he wouldn't stop talking to Kaoru for a stupid reason like that. "Let me guess, you want to know who I'm talking to, right?"

"Well, yes, kinda." She said, looking sheepish.

"My twin brother, Kaoru." Hikaru gestured to his twin, knowing that all they saw was empty air.

She opened her mouth, but Tamaki interjected before she could get the words out.

"Hikaru does play it up quite a bit for the club, but he really does believe his brother's there. We won't appreciate you being mean to him, no matter how cute you are!" The Host King exclaimed and the girl gave him a strange look.

"What are you talking about, sempai?" she said, her face both confused and annoyed. "I was just wondering why you guys only introduced one of them."

Everyone's mouths fell open in shock, but she paid them no mind.

"You two really do look exactly alike, except for your hair being parted on different sides." She said with a smile.

Hikaru suddenly couldn't find his voice so Kaoru spoke instead, wondering if this was really happening. "What's your name again?"

"Haruhi. Haruhi Fujioka." She said. "Are you two alright? You got really pale."

"Kaoru." Hikaru suddenly said.

"Right." His twin responded and they grabbed the girl, Haruhi,'s arms and dragged her out of the room.

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><p>"You can see him?" Hikaru demanded. "You can really see him?"<p>

"Yes?" Haruhi responded, puzzled.

"Can you hear me?" Kaoru asked, his voice hesitant.

"Obviously, since I answered you earlier. What's going on?" Haruhi asked.

"No one's been able to see Kaoru for a long time, for some reason." Hikaru said.

"We're not really sure when it started, we didn't notice for a while." Kaoru finished, exchanging a glance with his brother and they simultaneously reached for each other's hands.

"Haven't seen-Oh. _**Oh**_. I'm so sorry." Haruhi suddenly said, her eyes widening even more (how had they ever mistaken those eyes to belong to a boy?).

"Sorry?" the twins asked in unison.

"Your aura is so faint; I don't really have the best eyesight."

"Aura?" They asked together again.

"Normally I can tell the difference." She said, shaking her head. "I see ghosts. How long have you been dead, Kaoru?"

For the second time in their lives, Hikaru and Kaoru felt the world spin away from under their feet.

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><p><strong>If it's not too much trouble, please leave a review!<strong>


	2. Futari

The edges of the dream were showing again.

Kaoru observed the fact in silence, sitting on his desk chair and watching his brother maniacally pour over site after site of Black Magic.

He hadn't taken Haruhi's news well.

Kaoru felt as though he should be the more upset of the two of them, that he should be a wreck and his brother should be trying to comfort him, but that was not the case. Kaoru accepted the news with shock and horror, yes, but he accepted the news. It really did explain a lot, after all.

Hikaru, though…..Hikaru had not _accepted_ the news by any means. He was indeed shocked and horrified and dismayed, but he was denying it too. Or, rather, denying that it wasn't something he could _fix_.

The first stop had been Nekozawa and his Black Magic Club. When it was revealed to the upperclassman that Hikaru actually wasn't crazy and had been seeing his brother's ghost all along, the older boy had been ecstatic at the idea of something so occult happening within the school. After he'd gotten over that, he and his club had consulted among themselves and eventually come to the conclusion that there was only one real way to bring a dead person back to life.

But Hikaru wasn't ready to go there yet if there was another way. So he was on the internet, begging and bargaining with people on forums who seemed to know what they were talking about, who would email him links to old websites that looked as though they'd been made at the start of the internet or to scans of books whose pages looked like they were older than time itself.

But all of them seemed to say more or less the same thing.

Bringing someone back to life was a big commitment, the spell, if it worked, would require proof of just how far the person in question was willing to go.

But Hikaru would go to any length for his brother, if that was what must be done. There was nothing he wouldn't do. Nothing.

Kaoru knew Hikaru was trying to hide the darkness of his thoughts from him, but Kaoru knew him too well for that.

"Hikaru." He said after a long moment, wondering if, since he was dead, his voice actually made any sound at all. Maybe the people that heard him were actually receiving his voice telepathically?

"What?" Hikaru said, turning and edging slightly in front of the screen, as if Kaoru hadn't been able to see over his shoulder just a moment ago.

"This isn't a good idea." Kaoru said.

"Don't worry, Kaoru, I'm going to fix all of this." Hikaru promised.

"Don't, Hikaru. It's fine. I haven't gone anywhere all these years; I've even grown alongside you. We can stay like we are. I don't need anyone else to see me, it's fine. Just leave it be." Kaoru pleaded.

"It's not fine!" Hikaru shouted, standing up and knocking the chair over as he did. Something black grew behind his eyes. "You're dead, Kaoru! That's not fine! You're dead! You're dead." Hikaru sucked in a deep breath before righting his chair and going back to the internet. "_But you won't be for long._ Don't worry about anything; I'm going to fix this, Kaoru."

Kaoru sat in silence, watching as the edges of the dream closed in on them.

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><p>The blackness was a bit daunting at first. It lay beyond the edges of the world they lived in now, the one where Hikaru did his damn best to forget his brother was dead while also trying to fix the predicament. It was a soulless blackness and Kaoru didn't want anything to do with it. He wondered if he was supposed to go into that darkness, if that's where his soul should go now that he realized he was a soul and might need to go off to some sort of afterlife.<p>

But he rejected any afterlife, no matter if it held good things or bad things. He needed to stay with his brother and that was that. If he went anywhere, it would be with Hikaru right next to him, fingers clutching his, footsteps synchronized so that wherever they went, it would be at the same time.

At first, he'd wondered if Hikaru could see that blackness too.

Slowly, though, he'd come to the realization that, yes, his brother could see it. And that it also wasn't there for Kaoru.

That's not saying the blackness didn't _want_ Kaoru, it most surely did, it was just that Hikaru had called this forth with the darkness of his own thoughts and now it wanted to suck him down into it, engulf him in a pit of dark, dense, blackness that he would never escape from.

Kaoru doubled his attempts to convince Hikaru that he was fine with being a ghost. He'd point to the edges, the abyss that waited for his brother, shouting and shaking the living twin, crying and pleading for him to stop. But Hikaru stared in the abyss and it stared back at him.

"Don't worry, Kaoru." Hikaru said, his voice strangely blank as he returned to his computer screen. "I'm going to fix everything."

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><p>Suddenly, one day, Kaoru noticed his brother had stopped looking through websites. He asked him about it, but Hikaru's smile was wrong<em>wrong<em>_**wrong.**_

"Did you find anything, Hikaru?" Kaoru asked at length, not wanting to sound hopeful, because really, he was fine as a ghost, he had his brother and that was enough.

Hikaru paused for several long seconds, his expression wavering through a great many things. "Yes." He answered and his voice was blank as his face suddenly was. "I found something."

Kaoru wanted to press for details, but Hikaru was walking quickly to his next class and Kaoru has to run to keep up.

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><p>The next day, Haruhi is absent from class.<p>

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><p>The day after that is Tamaki.<p>

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><p>After Tamaki is Kyoya.<p>

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><p>The day after that, Mori is gone and Honey looks nervous and small in the halls by himself.<p>

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><p>And the Honey is missing too.<p>

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><p>Kaoru knows Hikaru is responsible, he knows it like a fact, demands to know where his friends have gone, because they <em>were<em> his friends. Through Hikaru, he'd come to love them. But Hikaru claimed innocence as the edges closed in on him, the blackness clawing at him from the outside and from within his own dead eyes.

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><p>On the seventh day since Haruhi had first gone missing, Hikaru wept bitterly into his brother's lap, wailing that it hadn't worked, <em>it hadn't worked<em>, _**it hadn't worked.**_

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><p>Red-and-red-and <em>the smell of pennies in the air <strong>what-have-you-done?<strong>_ It's-gone-gone-gone-now red-blue-red-blue lights flas

_Hands clasped and they ran and ran_ up and up _they ran and ran and the blackness crawled behind them and they laughed and laughed and laughed **and laughed AND LAUGHED.**_

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><p>At the end of a road, in what was once a wealthy neighborhood, sits a mansion. It is abandoned and decrepit, but one can easily see how grand it'd once been. It's said that long ago, a young man lived here with his family who wasn't quite right. He talked to himself all of the time and claimed he had an invisible twin brother.<p>

Then, one day, the boy snapped and murdered all of his closest friends, painting the walls of the basement with their blood. The police found out two days later when the boy commited suicide and they discovered the horrific scene underneath the house.

The family, aghast, has long since moved away, as have all of the other families, trying to get away from the nightmare that occurred so near to them.

It's said that if you go into the mansion at any time of day, you can hear the laughter of a child, strangely echoed, as if there were two of them, chasing each other about the old mansion. If you stay longer than that, which few people ever do, the legend goes that you will feel a chill up your spine and hear a voice right in your ear.

"_Let's play the—"_

"—_Which-one-is-Hikaru Game!"_

The best bet is to run in this situation. The kind of people who don't back down from challenges have yet to be seen or heard from again.

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><p><strong>This can be entirely blamed on 1zippy, who has been trying to persuade me to follow this up for about a week now. I hope you enjoyed it!<strong>


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